Nulcear "Liberation" and the Making of a Divided Korea: A Conversation with Christine Hong
- KPI
- 2 hours ago
- 13 min read
By Léopold Lambert | November 9, 2025 | Originally published in The Funambulist
The 1945 defeat of Japan was meant to signify Korean liberation. In Manchuria, anticolonial and communist Korean guerillas were joined by the Soviet Union and Mongolian armies in August 1945, and proceeded to oust the Japanese from Korea. The US, however, imposed a partition of the peninsula following the 38th parallel, which was crystallized by the “bombing holocaust” of the Korean War starting 1950. In this conversation, Christine Hong provides useful historical context to understand the significance for Korea of the few weeks/years that followed the US nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT: When I visited the Nagasaki memorial in 2024, I was struck by the sole presence of the Republic of Korea flag, a state that “represents” only the southern half of the country, and that did not exist in 1945 for the colonized Korean laborers in Japan killed by the nuclear bombings. How were the weeks that followed crucial for the way Japan-occupied Korea gave birth to the two militarized regimes we know today?
CHRISTINE HONG: The historian Gar Alperovitz once stated that the atomic bombings of Japan represented not just World War II’s last act, but also the Cold War’s opening salvo. Few people would dispute that the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the closing punctuation point to World War II, but Alperovitz’s revisionist account compels us to consider their proleptic Cold War significance. By use of the atomic bomb, the United States sought to secure for itself a position of regional domination, if not global supremacy. Even though there was a two-front, US-Soviet Allied strategy for Japan’s defeat, the atomic bombings were a unilateral act, a spectacular showcase of US annihilatory power. The goal was to gain the upper hand in shaping the postwar world order. And let’s be clear: contrary to the retroactive propaganda tale spun by Truman’s secretary of state Henry Stimson that were it not for the bomb, over a million US soldiers would have been killed in the Pacific Theater, Japan had been negotiating surrender for about a year. Stimson’s postwar insistence on the bomb’s military necessity thus obscures the political implications of the US decision to use the bomb. By putting the Soviet Union, its wartime ally, on notice, the United States launched the Cold War.
Yet the nuclear bombings granted broad geostrategic latitude to the United States in ways that go unrecognized. Over the years, I’ve thought about how Alperovitz’s insight might be understood relative to Korea. If the atomic bombs birthed the Cold War, the division of and ensuing hot war in Korea were seized to consolidate a nuclearized Cold War world order. On August 10, 1945, a day after the US bombing of Nagasaki and five days before Emperor Hirohito went on the radio to formally announce Japan’s surrender, Korea’s fate was sealed behind closed doors. Armed with a National Geographic map of Korea, two US military officers, Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel, adjourned to a side room and divided the Korean peninsula. In so doing, they created a Cold War blueprint for hot wars to come in Asia where the United States created or backed politically partitioned geographies, such as Taiwan and South Vietnam, and repeatedly intervened in peoples’ decolonizing struggles for national liberation and
self-determination.
By dividing the peninsula, the United States imposed on Korea, a colony of Imperial Japan, the fate visited on Germany, an enemy nation, after its defeat. Yet why was Korea—not Japan—severed in two?
Korea, after all, was a victim of Japan’s imperialist aggression and settler colonial expansion. As Rusk recounted, he and Bonesteel chose the 38th parallel in order to keep Seoul in the US occupation zone. To achieve this goal, they heedlessly bisected Kaesong and other Korean towns and villages, devastating numerous communities and families. Did they consult with any Korean? Not remotely. Did they consider the anti-colonial struggle Koreans had been waging? Not at all. Neither gave a damn about the Korean situation in its material particulars. What this meant was that Korea’s liberation occurred in the same historic window as its tragic division. Both were consequent to the US atomic bombings in Japan.
In Dictée (1982), Korean American artist and writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha describes Korea’s division in language that captures the equivocal nature of US intervention: Korea was severed in two by an enemy clad in liberator’s garb. With foreseeable tragic consequences, the act of partition triggered a brutal war of national reunification in which the United States aggressively intervened, ruling the skies, contemplating using atomic bombs to create a “zone of cobalt” between Korea and China where no life could be sustained for a hundred years, and perpetrating what historian Bruce Cumings calls a “bombing holocaust.” Especially ruinous for the north, which the United States indiscriminately targeted as a “red region,” US bombing also devastated the south. Across the peninsula, an estimated 4 million Koreans were killed. This death toll is inexact because Korean lives, and therefore deaths, did not matter. Some Chinese statistics indicate that North Korea, which has never disclosed numbers, lost upwards of 30% of its population. Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay, head of the US Strategic Air Command, casually later remarked that the air force killed off 20% of the total Korean population. He conceded that had the United States lost—to be clear, it did not win—he would have been tried as a war criminal.
LL: The five years following the two nuclear bombings led to another particularly devastating war—usually called the “Korean War.” Could you talk to us about it?
CH: Many people in the United States think the Korean War was just one of many small wars the United States has waged in far-off places around the world. They don’t grasp the seismic transformation of the world order it facilitated. The official US line on the war, as expressed on the plaque at the Korean Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, DC, is that the United States sacrificed its own sons and daughters to save Koreans—the implication is from global communism. Yet this message contradicts Secretary of State Acheson’s statement in 1954: “Korea came along and saved us.” So which of these claims is true? Did the United States altruistically enter the war to save a benighted people in a distant country, or did the Korean War somehow save the United States? And why would the United States, recently victorious in World War II, need saving? Only if we take stock of the fact that the United States was transformed into a total war state during World War II can we understand that the Korean War was a godsend, rehabilitating a US economy geared toward total war. By authorizing a sweeping infrastructure of violence, the war’s implications exceed Korea itself. The war consolidated the US national security state. It legitimated the expansion of the US empire of bases and fortified the military-industrial complex. It placed the United States on permanent war footing, giving rise to a post-World War II pattern of US forever wars. The Korean War also hardened the division of the Korean peninsula by supplanting the 38th parallel with the demilitarized zone.
Yet what actually is the nature of the US-South Korea alliance, its touted bonds forged in blood? We understand this to be a “strategic partnership” between unequal parties, with South Korea, in the first instance an anticommunist US creation, serving as a host site for a US garrison state that encircles the globe. What is less evident, given this rhetoric of friendship, is how South Korea figures as collateral damage in US war plans. Geography is key. The US division of Korea at the 38th parallel means North and South Korea’s capitals are in theory a relatively short car ride away from each other. There is therefore no nuclear targeting of North Korea that would leave the south unscathed. US apocalyptic designs toward Pyongyang cannot but encode the deaths of millions of South Koreans who are not formally US enemies.
This returns us to what it means that the United States liberated Koreans, first from Imperial Japan and shortly thereafter from the forces of global communism.
What does it mean that Koreans were “liberated” by means of the atomic bomb in 1945 and through a bombing holocaust less than half a decade later?
For Koreans, an estimated 5.4 million of whom had been conscripted into Japan’s war effort as forced labor, the US atomic bombings meant freedom from the fetters of colonial rule. But there was a dark side to the day of freedom people in South Korea celebrate as Gwangbokjeol, or the day that light returned: namely, the deaths of tens of thousands of enslaved Korean laborers at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Korean mass death was thus built into Korea’s liberation in ways that blur the distinction between friend and enemy and that inform US policy toward the divided peninsula to this day.
LL: The Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea were created in a context of nuclear imperialism, the United States having demonstrated the mass murderous effects of their bombs, and the Soviet Union using their first warheads in Kazakh Indigenous lands in August 1949. Eight decades later, is nuclearism still a productive framework to think of Korea’s current political conditions?
CH: Although not welcomed into the nuclear club, North Korea unquestionably is and has
been a nuclear power for over a dozen years. By acknowledging North Korea as such on his return to office, Trump rhetorically marked a stark departure from his predecessors. Crafted with the goal of preventing North Korea from advancing down the nuclear road, post-Cold War US policy has aimed at “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization.” This objective notwithstanding, US policy toward North Korea over the last three decades has been anything but consistent. In contrast to North Korea, the US side of things has been characterized by regime shifts—first Clinton, then Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, and now Trump again. Each US leader has gained political mileage by initially getting tough on North Korea and seeking to reverse their predecessors’ negotiating gains. Only late in the game—perhaps eyeing the Nobel Peace Prize, with the exception of Obama who was prematurely awarded it—have these presidents gotten vision by moving toward engagement. In practice, this has meant a remarkable succession of US nuclear threats against North Korea. In the early 1990s, Colin Powell, formerly Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George H.W. Bush, threatened to turn North Korea into a charcoal briquette. Less than a decade later, George W. Bush yoked North Korea into a tripartite “axis of evil,” and Donald Rumsfeld argued the viability of a two-front war strategy in the Middle East and North Korea. Obama wielded a nuclear-armed North Korea as a bogeyman for remilitarizing Asia and the Pacific and announced the use of stealth bombers in the annual war exercises the United States conducts in and around Korea. And during his first term, Trump threatened “fire and fury” against North Korea, placing “all options on the table.”
For North Korea, such threats do not come in a vacuum. More than virtually any other country, it intimately knows what it means to be in the US war machine’s crosshairs. In sheer tonnage, the United States dropped more bombs on North Korea, a country the size of Kentucky, than in the entire Pacific theater during World War II. It dropped over 420,000 bombs on Pyongyang, which had 400,000 residents in 1950. This is the definition of overkill.
As early as 1951, international delegations to North Korea remarked there was nothing left to bomb. Tellingly, North Koreans learned during this time to live underground. Schools, factories, dwellings, everything moved underground. Farmers ventured above ground at night to till their fields. For North Koreans as targeted life, night became day, day became night, and underground became home.
Let’s also recall that until the early 1990s, the United States, in blatant violation of the armistice agreement, deployed nuclear weapons systems to South Korea. It continues to deploy nuclear aircraft carriers—essentially mobile military bases and launchpads—as part of its trilateral war exercises with South Korea and Japan that simulate North Korea’s nuclear decimation. This is to underscore that North Korea not only experienced apocalypse at the hands of the United States, but thereafter, has faced the prospect of total annihilation. This is critical context for North Korea taking to the nuclear path. The 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) imposes a twofold obligation: non-nuclear states must not nuclearize, and nuclear powers must reduce and eventually eliminate their stockpiles. Yet the NPT has been wielded principally to crush the defense strategies of states that view the nuclear path as critical to their survival. While demanding that North Korea denuclearize, the United States has never taken measures to reduce its own nuclear stockpile. We should remember that during the “axis of evil” era, North Korea was urged by the United States to follow the “Libyan model” of nuclear dismantlement in order to have normalized relations with the West. North Korea watched US-engineered regime change in Libya with an eagle eye, understanding it to be an object lesson of what happens when countries consent to the eradication of their nuclear programs.
Yet North Korea’s commitment to the nuclear path has tragically meant that it has transformed itself into a target to ensure its own defense. In contrast to the United States, which tested “the gadget” in Indigenous lands in New Mexico, and the Soviet Union, which conducted nuclear tests on Kazakh lands, North Korea has tested its devices underground in its own northeast.
LL: We were put in touch by Lisa Yoneyama, who mentioned the documentary, Village of Widows, about Korean hibakusha in Hiroshima in her contribution. I think that you teach this film in your class called “The Nuclear Pacific,” right?
CH: Yes, that’s correct. There’s a scene from that documentary, the same one Lisa describes in her essay, that lingers with me. The film follows a delegation of Sahtu Dene elders and tribal members as they travel in 1998 to Hiroshima where they visit Korean hibakusha hospitalized with radiation sickness. Addressing the Koreans, a tribal elder movingly states, “We share your suffering. I am part of you.” How do we explain this encounter between peoples who are differently situated and ambivalently implicated within a nuclearized kill-chain? Mobilized by the Canadian settler state to extract uranium from their tribal lands for the Manhattan Project, Sahtu Dene miners and their families have suffered the mutagenic effects of radiation exposure across generations. Like Korean hibakusha, they have long campaigned for redress and justice. What does it mean when colonized peoples who belong to what Lou Cornum calls the “irradiated International” claim each other as relation? When the perpetrator nation refuses accountability, why do Indigenous people from Port Radium, themselves victims of nuclear imperialism, atone for the devastating effects of the US atomic bombing on Korean hibakusha in Hiroshima?
By exceeding the limits of the perpetrator-victim binary, this criss-crossing of the nodes of the nuclear Pacific allows something unexpected yet powerful to emerge.
Here, I am reminded of the fact that many of the enslaved Korean workers who were mobilized by the Japanese Imperial Army to labor in coal mines, factories, and other militarized industries came from Jeju Island. Seized as a launching pad for Japan’s invasion of the Chinese mainland, Jeju was a stopover in the Imperial Army’s infamous march to Nanjing in 1937. In the 1930s, Jeju people were conscripted to build Altteureu Airfield, a key refueling site for Japanese forces. Some died in the process. Yet even as they too were victims, Jeju islanders have repeatedly apologized to the people of Nanjing for their role in facilitating Imperial Japan’s atrocities.
LL: Any vision of Korean reunification that would repair the effects of 35 years of Japanese colonialism and subsequent decades of militarism, clearly could not involve the absorption of one regime by another, but rather the inventive creation of new political conditions. Are there people working towards this vision?
CH: Many people note that reunification is a moribund discourse that casts back to the time of US-backed military dictatorships in the south when “Tong-il” (통일) was the left’s rallying cry in South Korea and the Korean diaspora. Following the inauguration of the hardline South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol, who more recently was impeached after stunningly attempting to declare martial law, North Korea abandoned peaceful reunification and identified South Korea as a hostile state. In a 2023 constitutional amendment, it affirmed its nuclear status, clarifying that given continued US provocations, including combined-force war exercises that rehearse its invasion, regime collapse, and occupation, nuclearization ensures its right to existence.
Yet if “Tong-il” is a dated term in the south, it’s also crucial to acknowledge that South Korea remains militarily occupied by the United States but generally speaking has an impoverished vocabulary for grappling with US imperialism. For Koreans, whether north or south, “Ilje-sidae” (일제시대) serves a common term of reference for the era of Japanese colonial rule. Yet if you mention “Mije-sidae” (미제시대), or the era of US imperial rule, to South Koreans whose sons are conscripted into mandatory military service, whose territory is occupied by the US military, and whose separation from family in the north is a consequence of the Korean War’s irresolution, you’ll likely draw a blank stare. There is little critical education, certainly not in formal spaces of learning, that enables people to grasp their own material conditions under US imperialism and to understand the Korean War not as an event, but as a durable structure that persists to this day.
It is within a landscape conditioned by a fog of war that normalizes Korea’s division that groups like the South Korean civil-society organization, Solidarity for Peace and Reunification in Korea (SPARK) do urgent work. Emerging from the anti-imperialist wing of the democracy movement, SPARK formed during the first early 1990s’ North Korean nuclear crisis and thereafter organized delegations to NPT review conferences. In recent years, it has focused on overdue recognition of and justice for Korean A-bomb victims whose suffering has been minimized in even progressive, US-Japan no-nukes organizing efforts. The challenge remains not only US disavowal of its war crimes accountability but also the illegibility of Korean victims as colonized hibakusha. Since 2019, Korean hibakusha, supported by SPARK and an alliance of organizations, researchers, and activists in South Korea, the United States, and Japan, have taken part in many events, including three fora in Seoul, Hapcheon, and Hiroshima, in preparation for a major international people’s tribunal, focused on Korean A-bomb victims that will take place in New York next year. This past March, Korean hibakusha testified in Chicago about the world-shattering aftermath of the bomb, including its mutagenic effects. In calling for a nuclear-free world, they have focused on the United States, their supposed liberator from imperial rule, describing the 1945 US atomic bombings as “the original sin.” Although not foremost in their vocabulary, is “reunification” still a structuring freedom dream? I would say, Yes.
Christine Hong is a professor of ethnic studies and literature at UC Santa Cruz where she directs the Center for Racial Justice. She serves on the board of directors of the Korea Policy Institute, an independent research and educational organization, and is a core member of the Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. Her book, A Violent Peace: Race, Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific, was published in 2020.
